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G.E. Agrees to Clean Part of Tainted River in Massachusetts

The General Electric Company has agreed to spend $150 million to $200 million to clean up a contaminated stretch of river in western Massachusetts in a settlement that Federal regulators described today as a significant victory for the environment and a city.

In announcing the deal, the company and the Environmental Protection Agency said removing sediment laden with PCB's from an abandoned electric-transformer plant would rejuvenate a two-mile stretch of the Housatonic River and the city it flows through, Pittsfield, Mass.

The agreement apparently ends months of negotiations that began some two decades after industrialists and regulators alike recognized that PCB's, polychlorinated biphenyls, once widely used in manufacturing, were dangerous to human health and might cause cancer.

Carol M. Browner, who heads the environmental agency, said an economic redevelopment package that G.E. had agreed to as part of the deal would help return prosperity as well as environmental safety to Pittsfield, an economically ailing city of about 50,000 people in the Berkshires.

For its part, General Electric said in a statement by Stephen D. Ramsey, its vice president for corporate environmental programs, that it was ''pleased to enter a new phase of investing in the future of Pittsfield and Berkshire County.''

At first glance, the Pittsfield agreement seemed to invite comparisons with the environmental agency's continuing battle against G.E. over PCB contamination of the Hudson River from two abandoned plants in Fort Edward and Glens Falls, but people familiar with both cases cautioned that they were far from parallel.

They are vastly different in scale (2 miles of the Housatonic will be cleaned; some experts say about 40 miles of the Hudson should be dredged), and the Hudson River case is in a much earlier stage: the E.P.A. may not announce its long-range plan for cleaning up the river until December 2000.

The cost of the Hudson cleanup could be far higher if the most radical proposals, including dredging many miles of contaminated riverbed, are carried out. General Electric has insisted that leaving the tainted sediment alone might be safer than removing it.

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The Housatonic was fouled around Pittsfield by a G.E. complex that opened more than a half-century ago, employed about 13,000 workers at its peak and closed in the early 1980's when the company quit making large electric transformers, company spokesmen said today. (General Electric has a separate plastics unit in Pittsfield that employs about 700.)

Company officials often point out that many companies used PCB's before their hazardous nature was recognized, and disposed of them in ways that were legal then, like letting waste flow into rivers. At Pittsfield, PCB's were used in liquid that seemed an ideal replacement for the flammable mineral oil, which was once used in transformers, said Bruce Bunch, a G.E. spokesman.

The Housatonic accord, which lawyers on both sides expect to be spelled out in a consent decree in Federal Court before winter, calls for G.E. to divert the worst stretch of river, a half-mile section that flows through the 250-acre plant complex, remove the tainted sediment and put the river back on its original course.

Tainted sediment will also be removed from a separate one-and-a-half-mile stretch downstream, though the environmental agency will bear some of that cost. G.E. has agreed to restore soil and vegetation to damaged riverbanks and to pay some $15 million to bolster the surrounding wildlife habitat. General Electric will tear down some buildings in the old complex and refurbish others before turning them over to Pittsfield for new development.

Mr. Bunch estimated the total cost to General Electric at $150 million, but an environmental agency official said it could top $200 million.

''If they can do it in less, God bless them,'' this official said.

The accord averted use of the Superfund law, under which the Government could have done the cleanup, then billed General Electric. John De Villars, the agency administrator for New England, said the agreement carried ''a spiritual and psychic value'' for all parties, one ''that can't be quantified but is every bit as important as the substantial financial and economic factors.''